Re: re HD 155229

[Tom Droege <tdroege2@earthlink.net>]

Hopefully this is one area where we can contribute.  If a star is bouncing 
around a mag, then lots of people can find it.  The number of stars known 
with small amplitude is much less than those with large variation.  They 
are just harder to discover.  (Bohden Paczynski points this out in his 
various papers on the subject.)  There are also probably more small 
amplitude stars than large amplitude ones.  But one does not know until you 
do a careful survey and catalog everything down to some small amplitude 
limit.  Then the theorists can get to work and look at the distributions 
and draw come conclusions.  Without a good unbiased data set, this is hard 
to do.

So unless experts tell me that low amplitude stars are not interesting, I 
will encourage you to follow a full spectrum of magnitude variation.

Having said this, you might want to avoid stars that are flagged as 
saturated.  Put your effort into the clearly variable stars until we learn 
a little more about our calibrations from night to night.  I think we have 
enough to keep you busy.  I can always find you more to work on.

Tom Droege

At 02:14 PM 8/10/02 -0500, you wrote:
>I finally got a look at the TASS data for this thing and, boy, this may or 
>may not really be variable. The standard deviation for all the V 
>magnitudes is only 0.0346. For each night is it 0.02. The difference in 
>the average magnitude between the two nights is only 0.06. If you average 
>4 observations at the beginning and end of each night, though, the first 
>night it brightens by 0.025 mags and the second night it brightens by 0.09 
>mags. That's 0.013 mag/hr the first night and 0.078 mag/hr the second night.